A Little Help from My Friends
I saw the gleam in Tiny’s eyes and wondered how I was going to get myself out of this one. I decided I had only one chance.
“Wait. Is that Ron?” I said, looking behind him.
As Tiny’s head whipped around, I gathered my strength and started sprinting the other direction. I didn’t like abandoning my plan to surrender myself, but I wouldn’t be much good to Hope and Jin if I was missing some essential limbs. I figured Tiny’s bulk might hinder him in the trees. If I could get even a small lead, I was confident I could lose him. The first hundred yards would be the key. If he caught me in that stretch, I would be like a mouse in the grasp of a mountain lion.
I prayed that he would trip and fall.
He didn’t.
As I entered a clearing, I heard his footsteps, and I swore I could feel his breath on my back. It smelled like stale Easy Cheese. His legs must have been as strong as the rest of him because he seemed to cover the distance about three times as fast as I did. There was no way I was going to escape. So I did the next best thing. I dropped to my knees and threw my fist into his approaching groin. His momentum took him through the air and over the top of me. I got up and ran again. Between the placement of the blow and his speed coming toward me, he’d be on the ground for several minutes.
But within seconds, he was standing in front of me, smiling his sadistic smile, stretching to crack the bones in his neck, waiting to inflict some serious pain. “The smaller guys always go there,” he said. “That’s why I started wearing protection on every job.”
I had no choice now. I took a deep breath and tried to remember my training. Self defense will get you killed, Zack’s voice boomed inside my head. The only thing that will keep you alive is eliminating the threat. I began to locate the targets on Tiny’s body that would disable his central nervous system and make it impossible for him to hurt me: eyes, temple, neck, throat, bladder, knees . . . I ruled out the groin. If I could strike one or multiple of these targets, any man, no matter how large, would go down. The problem with Tiny was that he was not only large, but he was also so layered with muscle that it was almost as if he were wearing body armor. I’d felt it when I’d hit him in the side of the neck earlier. I’d felt it when I’d pushed against his wrist to keep him from shooting me. Anything short of a crippling blow would just incite him into a murderous rage.
I took another breath as he circled and tried to think back to more of Zack’s training. The advantage of facing a big man is that you can use his own momentum against him. I told myself this was no different than facing Zack. He was about Tiny’s size—bigger in those days—and Zack had been wearing full body armor when we’d faced him. But then again, Zack had been trying to teach us, not cripple us.
Tiny got tired of circling and stepped in with a roundhouse punch. He probably expected me to move backward, away from the punch, or put up my hands to try to block it. That would have been the reflexive thing to do, but my reflexes had been trained differently. I moved into him and slightly to the side. My left arm came up, not to block his fist but to guide it past me as I stepped in even more and used the leverage of his swing to put my right arm against his head and let his momentum pull us both down in a circular motion toward the ground. I hoped his head would land on a rock. Instead, we landed on grass softened by a trickling spring. When his head hit, it sounded like he had landed on a damp, squishy pillow. I rose to continue my attack, but he pulled up his knees and threw me through the air and past him.
My back hit a tree, and the air went out of me. For a moment, I panicked. I couldn’t feel my legs, and I couldn’t catch my breath. Tiny bellowed into the night like a wounded bear, and I feared I had awakened a hidden beast. At least I wouldn’t be able to feel anything as he ripped my legs from my body.
But then I felt the tingling return to my limbs, and my struggling lungs finally found the air they sought. I was still seeing stars as I heard Tiny approaching. I thought about playing dead but, for some reason, remembered Ron’s instructions about dealing with a bear encounter: if the bear is just surprised, playing dead might work to let it know you are not a threat, but if the bear is predatory, you’d better just fight for your life. I thought that Tiny could safely be classified in the second category. I didn’t think he was used to being taken down in a fight—especially by a smaller man. I might not have hurt him, but I had deeply wounded his pride.
I lay there and tried to control my rapidly beating pulse, realizing that surprise might be the only weapon I had left. I could feel his body towering over me, and I heard his heavy breathing.
“You’re going to pay for that,” he growled through his breaths. “Nobody takes me down like that. Nobody.” He stopped speaking for a second, and it sounded like he was pounding the palm of his hand against the side of his head. “And you got water in my ear,” he said finally. “I hate water in my ears.”
For a big, strong guy, Tiny seemed to have a lot of little things that bothered him. The problem was I now seemed to be on the top of that list.
I felt his large hands reaching toward me like crab claws, threatening to crush me in their grip.
I kicked out, and my foot caught the inside of his knee. I felt his kneecap move from the front of his leg over to the side, and he roared in pain. I tried to follow with another kick to the bladder, but I was in an awkward position, and I couldn’t get much leverage. Instead, I caught him in the stomach. For most people, that might have also been a desirable target, but Tiny had abs like corrugated iron, and I thought the impact might have broken something in my foot, not in him.
But I didn’t have time to test it because Tiny’s rage overcame his pain, and his hands finally found their way to my body. He lifted me as if I were a rag doll and shook me as he roared. I tried to put my thumbs in his eyes, but he flipped me around, pulled his forearm into my throat, and locked it in place with his other hand. I was officially done. Once again the air was driven from my body, and I was sure this time that I would not get it back.
There were moves I had been taught to escape such a hold, but for some reason, my brain couldn’t remember what any of them were. I watched as the light began to fade. I heard a loud crack and thought that maybe the bones in my neck had broken, but then Tiny said, “Ouch,” and loosened his grip just enough that I caught a quick breath.
“Ouch,” Tiny said again. “Hey, stop that.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement. Someone was attacking Tiny, hitting him on the head with large sticks. At first I thought maybe Ron had dispatched Jackson and Jillian quicker than expected, but then my heart sank. The four boys that I’d thought were long gone, the same four boys Hope had made me promise to keep safe, were now moving around like dwarves attacking a cyclops. Not only had I failed to win the fight, but it had all been for nothing.
Their efforts were valiant and extremely courageous as one by one they darted in and whacked Tiny’s head, but aside from a slight lessening of Tiny’s grip around my throat, the blows weren’t having much impact. Mere mosquitoes buzzing around a dragon’s head. Enough to annoy but not to inflict any real damage.
“You boys just wait,” Tiny said between curses. “I’m going to tear you limb from limb.”
But the boys didn’t stop. Eric stepped in for a swing, and Tiny caught the stick in his free hand. With one motion, he threw the stick, and Eric went flying with it. Eric got up quickly from the ground, but this seemed to make the other boys more cautious.
“Oh, I’m gonna have fun watching you boys cry,” Tiny said as he once again increased the pressure on my throat. I felt myself blacking out.
“Let him go,” Joey said, stepping in front of the big man. Tiny was on one knee, the other one grinding into my back. Joey looked him directly in the eye.
Tiny laughed. “What are you going to do, little man?”
Joey didn’t say anything; he just held up one hand in front of Tiny’s face and arced the other arm behind his head in what looked to be some sort of martial arts pose.
I felt Tiny’s chest heave up and down as he began to laugh. “Is that supposed to be some sort of Power Ranger move or something?”
Joey nodded. “I call it the spider,” he said, and then he opened his outstretched hand, revealing one of the large arachnids from Spider Hollow. He pushed it toward Tiny’s face. The man began to yell, and as he opened his mouth the spider jumped inside, perhaps searching for a place of refuge. Tiny began flailing, but he didn’t release his hold on my neck. He did, however, ease up enough for me to catch a few precious breaths, and suddenly I remembered clearly what I had been taught about escaping the grip of a choke hold.
In training they referred to it as joint manipulation. In practicality, it meant finding and breaking the little finger. I found Tiny’s little finger, and I broke it. He screamed, but it was muffled by the gagging noises he was making trying to expel the spider from its new hole. As I took control of his hand, I spun around and used his weight against him, pulling his arm behind his back and dislocating his shoulder with a nasty pop. That was also joint manipulation. A normal person would have been out of commission at this point, but this was Tiny, and his strength was anything but normal.
I followed up with a fist to his windpipe and then a hard forearm to the temple. Despite all of this, he rose to his full height, holding at his throat and slapping at his open mouth. I hit him in the throat again with little impact. But with the third blow, his eyes rolled to the top of his head. He tottered for a minute and then crashed to the ground like a mighty redwood bouncing hard before settling into stillness. The spider crawled out of his mouth and scampered quickly into the underbrush. Joey breathed a sigh of relief.
I was also breathing, deep and clear, but still trying to recover fully. Peng, Eric, and JR tentatively made their way up to where Joey and I were standing. We all looked at the fallen giant, and for some reason, it felt like we were looking out upon the Grand Canyon, awestruck at the spectacle.
“That was one big dude,” JR said.
Eric turned to me, his mouth still open in awe. “You took him out, Brother Knight. I can’t believe it.”
“I had some help from my friends,” I said, suddenly realizing I didn’t just like these boys; I loved them. I held out my arms, and we shared a group hug that somehow didn’t seem the least bit awkward. “I wouldn’t have made it without you guys. Thank you.”
I released the boys and looked at Peng. “I thought the plan was to take these guys out of here.”
Peng shrugged. “Joey wouldn’t let us leave without you.”
“And you can’t say no to Joey,” JR added. “He’s a tough kid.”
“That he is,” I said as I ruffled my hands through Joey’s hair. “You all are. I think you are some of the bravest people I’ve ever known.”
“Hey, Brother Knight,” Eric said. “You should be a cage fighter. That was awesome. Where’d you learn those MMA moves?”
I thought about it and almost laughed. “You wouldn’t believe me.”
“C’mon,” JR said. “You have to tell us.”
“My old bishop taught me,” I said, silently grateful to Zack for his training. “It’s amazing what you can learn from a good bishop.”